Nils Faarlund is a living legend in the Nordic outdoor world. We had a chat about humanity, philosophy and our place in nature.

In the summer of 1966, a young bioengineer, a philosophy professor, and three of Faarlund's rope buddies shared a camp below Stetind, the iconic mountain in Northern Norway.

— I was provoked by the devastation that engineers had caused in the mountain landscape and told Arne about a new science called ecology that I had come across during a scholarship exchange at the University of Hanover.

The engineer was Nils Faarlund and Professor Arne Næss, head of the Philosophical Institute at Oslo University. They shared a passion for mountaineering and explored new trails on Stetind's kilometer-high south wall. Nils had started a rock climbing club at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim and he had convinced the renowned rock climber and philosopher Næss to accompany the four club members on the Stetind project.

— We could tempt him with CrMo bolts, an invention from the Yosemite Valley in California, says Nils with a smile.

The group spent the days making advanced climbs for the time and the evenings discussing philosophical and scientific problems. Nils and his comrades in the mountaineering club had seen the effects of Norway's reconstruction after the Second World War. During their tours, they saw giant ponds, drained lakes and rivers reduced to streams. They felt a frustration and desire to stop the devastation of the wilderness, but felt they lacked arguments.

— Our breakthrough came when Arne introduced the thinking of the 17th-century philosopher Spinoza. We combined the objective science of ecology with Spinoza's ideas about the intrinsic value of nature and landed in the foundations of what later came to be called ecophilosophy, deep ecology or ecosophy.

The central idea is that all living things have the right to live and thrive. Consequently, nature has intrinsic value, beyond what we can use it for. The perspective of modernity, where man is placed above nature, is destructive, and therefore not fruitful in the long term. The world is a complex whole of living things that exist in a fine balance. Changing that balance has serious consequences both for ourselves and other beings. In modern society, our task should be to learn to understand nature and adapt accordingly, not the other way around.

The pattern of thought that arose during Stetind in the summer of 1966 was developed in the following years into an effective tool to counter the policy of exploitation. A rapidly growing network of students, young academics and political activists created during a series of workshops and seminars a critique of the economic model where growth is the backbone of modern life: Ecophilosophy movement.

The way of thinking founded under Stetind had a striking public impact during the Mardølaaktion's non-violent protests in 1970 in defense of a breathtakingly beautiful mountain landscape in Eikesdalen. With the help of the Norwegian media's lack of sensationalism during the summer holidays, a new worldview gained an effective public breakthrough. The movement began to win battles over new dams and the mindset became influential in Norwegian politics as well as higher education, outdoor recreation, and civilian and military leadership training.

When Arne Næss successfully spread ecophilosophy to the international philosophical discourse, Nils started Norway's Høgfjellsskole, a school for mountain education, as a way to spread the message and create new "friends of nature" as Nils puts it. Leaving his research in biochemistry after the Stetind summer was a big step for Nils together with his wife and two-year-old son. He left the laboratory behind and moved to Hemsedal in the central Norwegian mountains.

From the beginning, Nils was supposed to take over the farm he grew up on, which had been in the family for generations. His father and grandfather were farmers but also the village's distillery master, a prestigious position. Nils' father encouraged him to apply to the technical university in Trondheim in order to later develop agriculture and the distillery. Nils was admitted to the course but fell in love with mountaineering and came into contact with ecology and philosophy.

— I grew up in the 40s with organic farming and animal husbandry in the forests around the farm, says Nils. At the time, play and discovery in the forests were part of the Norwegian rural lifestyle, but it was much later that he discovered the potential of traditional Norwegian outdoor life as a force for joy and political change. The word friluftsliv is a word that always tops lists of Norwegian's most loved words. It means spending time outdoors, but it also has a deeper meaning: To enjoy a dialogue with nature and to let oneself be influenced by the encounter.

— Outdoor life is a way of embodying the values ​​of eco-philosophy. Being in nature and experiencing harmony can give us true happiness. As humans, we are born to it. That's how we survived as a species. By understanding and learning about nature. The feeling of happiness that we can experience when we spend time in nature is our bodies' way of rewarding us for the lesson.

Nils turned 80 in 2017 and it has been over 50 years since the thoughts at Stetind began to take shape into a philosophy to escape from the brutality of modern society. The oil age that propelled Norway to one of the world's richest countries put an effective gag on the eco-philosophy in Norway. But the mindset was not outdated. In 2010, the Council for Ecophilosophy, a group of six people, three of whom were part of the Stetind Group, published the Stetind Declaration. The document describes the basics of eco-philosophy. It's easy to be amazed at how relevant the thinking from Stetind 1966 still is. Perhaps more relevant than ever.